Saturday Good Reads

For the past couple of years or so, I’ve participated in a Wednesday book discussion that’s known, well, as the Wednesday book discussion. We generally do books that are Christian classics, although there’s been an exception or two.

I’m the Johnny-Come-Lately to the group; I started participating about three books ago (when they decided to tackle Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis). Then we went on the Kisses from Katie by Katie Davis and we’re about right in the middle of A.W. Tozer’s The Pursuit of God.

The two organizers, lead discussants and linkmeisters (they do the Mr. Linky thing) are Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter.

Jason is the lead pastor at Breakthrough Church in Juneau, Alaska. Under the name of Jason Scott, he’s composed four worship albums. He’s a poet, too, and has a feature at his blog called Warrior Poets. Jason and his wife Andrea have four children (including foster children) and somehow he finds the time to manage a web site development company. Jason blogs at Connecting to Impact.

Not too far away from Juneau, Sarah Salter lives in the state of Washington. She’s originally from North Carolina, and tells wonderful stories – and some heartbreaking stores – about growing up there. Sarah is an administrative professional and freelance writer/editor. And she has a huge heart for missions. And she likes to hike. Sarah blogs at Living Between the Lines.

In addition to me, there are two other regular participants – Dusty Rayburn and Fatha Frank.

Dusty, who lives with his family in Alabama, blogs at Devoted Conversations. Here’s what he says about himself: “I am a Christian. I am not perfect, nor do I imagine I ever will be. My God is perfect. I am forgiven. I am loved. I am His.” He is a man with a heart for God.

Frank Friedl (we call him Fatha Frank) blogs at Public Christianity. In his own words: “A disciple of Christ and student of politics and pop-culture. A movie, music, sports and comic book buff who searches for spiritual meaning in the world around me.”

I follow all of them on Twitter and Facebook. We have a connection via The High Calling as well. I read their blog posts on Wednesdays about the books we’re discussing and the rest of the week on a lot of other topics, and find myself blessed every time.

Are We Fans or Disciples?

“When the New Testament was written,” writes Michael Spencer in Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality, “it was dangerous to be a fan of Jesus. It wasn’t wise to wear a Christian t-shirt. The latest Christian music wasn’t playing on anyone’s iPod. Christian gift stores and book nooks couldn’t be found. Christian conferences didn’t fill ancient stadiums with first-century believers who came to hear celebrity Christian speakers.”

The reality, Spencer says, was far different: the constant possibility of being arrested, you and/or your relatives imprisoned. Your last pastor was likely martyred. You were accused of political treason. You faced economic ruin. You were a target and blamed for everything from assassinations to earthquakes. And there was no New Testament read.

One might say that the believers of the first century were closer to the believers in the illegal house churches in contemporary China than they are to the Christian consumer culture we live and breathe in North America.

Spencer entitled this chapter “The Evangelical Sellout,” and the sellout he emphasizes is the sellout to consumerism, American style. The “menu” he describes for believers in a consumer culture is a demining one: Christian music and concerts, shopping for the coolest megachurch with the “celebrity communicator they’ve hired as pastor,” the Christian conferences and festivals, Christian magazines and movies (and books), Christian radio, the vast array of specialized Bibles, Christian self-help classes. Reading this chapter is an exercise in heaping burning coals on one’s head; my own hair feels more than slightly singed.

Why this matters, and matters urgently, is that, appearances notwithstanding, the evangelical church in North America is in serious danger. And the danger doesn’t come from the neo-atheists in academia, the ACLU, MoveOn.org, George Soros, Planned Parenthood, the New York Times or Nancy Pelosi.

The danger, the real threat, is within.


For some weeks now, Nancy Rosback at Nance Marie has been leading us in a discussion of Mere Churchianity; her post on chapter 16 can be found here. Also see Fatha Frank’s posts at Public Christianity and Melo’s at Humming Softly.

"Do You Really Want to Know?"

I was 24, working in Texas. I was walking to my office when I passed a new colleague in the hallway. “How’s it going?” I said causally as I walked by, more of an acknowledgement than a real question.

“Do you really want to know?” she asked.

The question stopped me cold. Simple politeness had become an opening into something else. I turned back and said, “Well, sure.” I was embarrassed.

And she proceeded to pour out a story that was stunning. She had become the guardian for a dearly beloved aunt, who would today be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. The aunt was wealthy, and the adopted son was none too pleased that my friend was the guardian, because he was trying to have his mother institutionalized, which terrified her. So he was, in effect, stalking and following my friend, attempting to frighten or threaten her into walking away.

To make matters worse, in going through her aunt’s papers, she learned why her aunt was so afraid of being institutionalized, because she had gained a lot of her wealth form a lifetime of having elderly friends committed after gaining control of their estates.

All of this came out in a torrent of tears. I did the only thing I knew to do. I listened. I asked questions. It was hard to imagine that what I was hearing was true, but it was. She became and stayed a good friend of mine and my wife’s for the next four years, until we moved to St. Louis.

In Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality, Michael Spencer talks about all of the formulaic statements (“How’s it going?”) that we use in the place of honesty in the church. And it’s more than what we say to each other when we are in Fellowship Hall between services or chatting briefly before Sunday School starts. “Social conventions, corporate culture, and the customs of casual human relationships all require that we sacrifice a good deal of honesty,” he writes. “We’re expected to smile, nod, and utter glob and meaningless comments every day.”

As Spencer indicates, that applies across the board, not just to churches. But he goes on to point out that this is perhaps why religion is so appealing to so many.

“Religion provides a blanket of insulation for those who are happy to go along with the superficial social conventions,” he says. “Religion tells us how to act sand what to say at life’s difficult moments. Religion often provides a script of polite, stoic, pious, and acceptable behavior to insert into moments of great questioning, pain, and disappointment.”

Then comes the challenge: to pursue an unscripted, honest life. This is what we were made for, and this is what each of us actually longs for. If we don’t find it in our churches, we will look elsewhere.

“Church has done one thing that has helped us,” he writes. “We now feel the emptiness in our souls, and we have realized that we need to find the real gospel, the honest Savior, and the promised life of the Spirit.”

And if someone asks us “Do you really want to know?”, we should say yes because we want to, not because we’re caught in an embarrassing moment.


Nancy Rosback over at Nancy Marie has been leading us in a discussion of Mere Churchianity. Also see Fatha Frank’s postings at Public Christianity and Melo’s post at In Silence, Humming Softly.

Wither Discipleship

“One of the saddest realities I’ve experienced,” writes Michael Spencer in Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality, "is the large number of people who have no concept of discipleship apart from what their church and its programs offer. Their concept of the Christian life is no more Kingdom oriented or Spirit filled than a meeting of the local women’s club or a Thursday night bowling league.”

The words are rather harsh. Spencer might say the reality is rather harsh, too.

A few years back, so many churches seemed caught up in what could only be called a “seeker craze.” Part of it was driven, I believe, by the numerical success of churches like Willowcreek in the Chicago area and Saddleback in California. It seemed like a huge new industry – consulting services, seminars, training sessions, facility redesign (don’t forget the latte bar), building programs. The leadership of so many churches seemed to distill all questions down to two, which were actually one: how to appeal to “seekers,” and how to grow. Numerical growth – membership, attendance, and giving – became the “measures of success.”

Group think became standard operating procedure. No one was allowed to question. There were even some adult Sunday School materials (from best-selling authors – teaching the Bible seemed rather quaint and old-fashioned) that had sections on how to deal with the “theology police” – people who raised questions about the Biblical soundness of the book being studied.

A lot of churches cracked wide open. Relationships were destroyed. Mistrust prevailed. People left.

For many, a major reality check came from – of all places – Willowcreek. A couple of years ago, Willowcreek published an extraordinary statement – that its multi-decade emphasis on “seekers” had shortchanged what the church was supposed to be about in the first place – discipleship, the making and equipping of disciples.

It was only Willowcreek where that had happened. Willowcreek happened to be among the very few churches that admitted it.

Here’s Spencer on how Jesus taught discipleship:

First, “Jesus made disciples through relationship and as a result of observation.”

Two, “Jesus made disciples out of these followers through their constant exposure to his teachings.”

Three, “Jesus put his disciples in a variety of situations that took them far beyond their comfort zones.”

Four, “Jesus allowed his followers to experience the power of the Holy Spirit for themselves.”

Five, “…for Jesus, participation in institutional Judaism – the church of his day – did not equal discipleship or participation in the movement he was making.”

Six, “Jesus created disciples by the power of the Holy Spirit illuminating the gospel in retrospect.”

And seven, “Jesus created disciples who were called and centered in the gospel announcement of war God was doing at the time.”

I read this, and I tremble.

I don’t know this discipleship.

I haven’t seen it for along time.


Nancy Rosback over at Bend the Page has been leading us in a discussion of Mere Churchianity, her post today is "Are you looking at me?" Also see Fatha Frank’s postings at Public Christianity, including "Of Sandlots and Cathedrals," and Melo's "Where We Meet."

Weakness: Faith Makes It Harder

“Faith, alive in our weakness, looks like a war,” writes Michael Spencer in Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality. “It’s an impossible war waged against an untiring adversary: our sinful, fallen nature. Faith fights this battle.”

That’s about as un-American statement as you can make. The way this is supposed to work is – gain faith, grow, be victorious – just like the whole self-improvement thing tells you. And America is not anything unless it’s the “land of opportunity” for self-improvement.

America is that. Or it has been that for most of its history. That idea is a very powerful part of our national DNA (and one reason why the Tea Party has been upending established politicians of both major parties).

But self-improvement – always getting better – always reaching newer and higher and better – is not exactly how faith works. That a lot of us think that way is an example of how culture can infiltrate faith. What we face with faith is decidedly different. Like Spencer says, “What does this fight look like? It’s a bloody mess. There’s a lot of failure in it. It is a battle where we are brought down again and again.”

Nobody tells you this when you become a believer. Often, you’re told just the opposite. You might be told about the process of sanctification lasting a lifetime – but it is usually described in terms of progress as opposed to process.

What no one tells you is that life will often become more difficult. “If anything,” he writes, “it’s a life that is far more uncomfortable than one’s life before encountering Christ.”

And what Spencer describes here has been precisely my own experience.

You study, you pray, you learn, you start doing things differently and thinking things differently, and one day without realizing it you’re suddenly doing what you always did. Bad habits. Addictions. Anger. Holding grudges. Teaching your children to do the same stupid things you do.

Brokenness.

It often seems easier to chuck the whole thing because it always seems so hard.

And then someone comes alongside and gives some encouragement, or you’ll read about others struggling the same way, or someone will come to you and ask for help and guidance. And you realize that all of us are broken, the mending will take our entire lifetimes, and it will never be completed.

So why bother?

Because the alternative is brokenness without hope.


Nancy Rosback over at Bend the Page has been leading us in a discussion of Mere Churchianity. Last week she discussed Chapter 11; this week she writes on Chapter 12. Also see Fatha Frank’s postings at Public Christianity, and his post last week entitled “Label Me, I’ll Label You.”

Adjectives

Michael Spencer doesn’t like adjectives. In Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality, he takes on all those adjectives we Christians – we American Christians – clutter our lives with.

Like in worship. Traditional worship. Seeker-sensitive worship. Emerging worship. Spirit-led Worship. Ancient-future worship. Dynamic worship. Extreme worship.

Or the victorious Christian life.

Or good Christian witness.

Or faithful church member. Or spiritual Christian. Carnal Christian. Reformed Christian. Fundamentalist Christian. Progressive Christian. Pentecostal Christian.

How about, totally confused Christian?

After experimenting with every kind of adjectival Christianity there was, Spencer finally came down to one question: could there be a gospel without adjectives?

The answer turned out to be yes. but a lot of stuff had to be cleared out of the way first. And then he heard a lecture on Martin Luther, and it knocked him flat. Spencer learned what Martin Luther had learned almost 500 years ago.

“For the first time,” he writes, “the truth that Jesus is the One Mediator between God and human beings knocked me to the floor and suspended me over the truth that God had done all things necessary for my salvation. I could stop looking for the secret key, and I could ditch the quest to demonstrate that I was a Christian hero. I was humbled as I looked at a universe of grace that filled my empty soul with the love of God in Jesus.”

There is nothing else I could say to add to that.


Nancy Rosback at Bend the Page, Fatha Frank at Public Christianity and I have been having a discussion about Spencer's  Mere Churchianity. Check their blogs for some really good thoughts.

Bible Reading

The night I became a believer (almost 38 years ago), I was given a green padded-cover copy of The Living Bible. I had read portions of the Bible before, and even memorized scripture for catechism (King James Version), but I had never really read the Bible before.

I was told to start reading the Gospel of John. I had never read it, and it was like reading a revolutionary treatise. Yes, Jesus loved me. Yes, he had a wonderful plan for my life.

But Jesus was a bomb thrower.

I hadn’t met this Jesus before. He didn’t mince words. He could be loving and tender, but he could also be fierce. He didn’t duck confrontation. And he had this laser-like ability to cut right to what the real issues were.

This was a Jesus I had never met before, almost a complete stranger.

In Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality, reading the Bible and especially the gospels is what Michael Spencer says will change your life, and possibly change it radically. He also says that it is exactly this practice of “reading Jesus first-hand” that many in the church find so threatening.

I pondered that: the American Christian church would find reading the Bible to be radical and threatening? This sounded almost pre-Reformation.

I didn’t know what I thought this until I pictured Jesus showing up to turn over the tables of the moneychangers in the temple – and it could have been where the prosperity gospel was being preached.

Or showing up at any church that believed it had the whole thing figured out and theologically mapped. Or how he might challenge our own learned teachers and theologians. Or that we would likely find him in the inner cities and Third World ghettos instead of the typical American suburb. He would be wherever the hurting, the needy and the poor would be found.

Spencer isn’t advocating the overthrow of the church. “I believe in the importance of Christian community and the ministry of that community to provide boundaries and definition to our spiritual growth and healthy spirituality,” he writes. “I mourn, however, the loss of our openness to the voice of the Holy Spirit directing us in new and important Jesus-shaped directions…The natural conservatism of institutions is deeply rooted in the desire to survive, and that desire colors and limits the way they read the Bible and how they see God functioning in the world.”

I believe in the church. I believe in the local church. I believe I attend a solid, Bible-teaching, Jesus-based church.

But I still have that copy of The Living Bible. And I remember what it was like to “read Jesus” for the very first time.


Nancy Rosback at Bend the Page, Fatha Frank at Public Christianity and I have been reading Mere Churchianity. Check their blogs for more discussion. See in particular Fatha Frank’s post on “The Perfect Church?” and Nancy’s post on chapter 9 on the book.

Serial Church Joiners and Leavers

I grew up in the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod. In high school, I attended a Southern Baptist church. In college, I didn’t attend anything.

After getting married and moving to Houston, we visited several churches and landed at a 12,000-member Methodist church (no one called them “mega-churches” back then). We enjoyed the people in our “young marrieds” Sunday School class, but doctrinally, well, let’s just say the Methodist Church was changing back then. We visited other churches and joined a non-denominational congregation called Spring Branch Community Church.

When we moved to St. Louis, we visited churches all over town; we discovered that churches were very different from those in Houston – more traditional, more denominational, less of the community we had at Spring Branch. We joined a Reformed Presbyterian congregation. A couple of years later, we found a small church similar to the one we had in Houston.

Then we bought a new house and the commute to church became a problem. So we joined a closer Evangelical Free congregation, and stayed there 15 years. Things changed, and we left. Six years ago, we joined the church where we worship now.

Except for the 15 years at the E Free church, we’ve been rather nomadic, following a similar path trod by millions of other American Christians. It’s a journey well recognized by Michael Spencer in Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality. His own path has been even more diverse, including checking into emergent churches, house churches, church renewal, church revival, media church, small groups and Catholic and Orthodox churches. (I’ll admit to having an attraction for the Catholic Church; I grew up a Lutheran minority in Catholic New Orleans.)

And if you ask what the next stop on the church tour will be, Spencer would say – there isn’t one. You’re not going to find what you’re looking for because it doesn’t exist. The perfect church doesn’t exist, and we serial church joiners and leavers can prove it.

“There is only one reliable constant,” Spencer writes. “There is God, who is moving people out into the world. This is a Spirit-led evolution of the movement Jesus started. It is a process of God moving Christians out of pews and toward the Kingdom that Jesus promised. And there is no predicting where that journey might take a person. But if it takes him or her outside organized Christianity, why would we argue with God about it?”

I may be wrong, but I don’t expect I’ll be moving outside organized Christianity. But I think Spencer is right, that there is a huge amount of ferment and change going on, and the future will look very different from the past.


We’ve been discussing Mere Churchianity with Nancy Rosback at Bend the Page and Fatha Frank at Public Christianity. Check their sites for more discussion.

Radical Inclusion

I was raised in the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod. My mother’s family was Lutheran; my father’s family Southern Baptist. In high school, I started to wander. This was 1968, and pretty much everything institutional was being questioned. I wasn’t so much questioning my own church as I was trying to find one with an active youth group. And I didn’t wander far. For a time I attended a Southern Baptist church, the one a lot of my friends, including my best friend in high school, attended.

I sang in the youth choir (for some reason, the music leader always looked at me when someone sang off key at practice). The summer after my junior year, I went with the youth group to Ridgecrest, North Carolina, for a week with Baptist youth from all over the South. It was a great week; I even ended up with a new girlfriend.

Late that summer, there was a meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention. It took place in Texas, and there was one major controversy that was going to be resolved – and that was whether local Southern Baptist churches should open their doors to African-Americans. There wasn’t a rule against it, of course, but longstanding tradition had the force of church law. The vote went against the resolution to open the doors.

This mattered to the youth group. It mattered a lot. At the next Sunday morning service, after the pastor had returned, he explained during the sermon how the debate had gone, and how he himself had voted. “I could not, in good conscience, vote for the resolution,” he said. The adult members of the congregation nodded in approval.

Sitting in the balcony (church youth groups always seem to sit in the balcony if there is one), the youth group was stunned. We knew how the vote had gone, but we had assumed the pastor voted for the resolution. His two sons were in the youth group, and they had assumed their father had voted for it. But he hadn’t; he had voted the way the congregation wanted him to vote.

The ridiculousness of this was obvious. Even assuming an African-American wanted to attend the church, which was highly doubtful given the denomination’s reputation at the time, would they be barred at the door? Would a deacon or usher throw a body block? Would the church lock the doors?

The youth group fractured and broke up. My best friend stopped going to church, and told his parents he was finished. A really good friend of his and mine told her parents she was changing churches, and she did. Others stopped coming altogether. The youth choir disintegrated. I finally stopped going, too. And I didn’t attend any church for the next five years.

I was reminded of this story while reading “Accepting the Real Jesus,” chapter 8 of Michael Spencer’s Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality. Knowledge of who Jesus is, even the limited knowledge of who he really is, is not enough. Acceptance must come, too. And these are the things, Spencer says, that must be accepted about the real Jesus:

• That Jesus preached, taught, and demonstrated the presence and priority of the Kingdom of God.
• That Jesus practiced radical inclusion of those who were excluded (and thus my story about the youth group).
• That Jesus was constantly engaged in producing disciples.
• That Jesus is the only mediator between God and humanity.
• That Jesus’ movement proclaims the gospel, encourages disciples, and witnesses to the presence of the Kingdom.

It wasn’t that the church youth group possessed more wisdom than the adults. And there were undoubtedly some feelings of superiority directed at the adults and the pastor for such a colossal failure in judgment, understanding and faith.

But the youth group did understand something the church didn’t. Virtually all of us went to public schools, and the public schools had been integrated two years before. After a year of upheaval and even some violence, everything calmed down; the kids figured out how to go to school together. And we discovered that white students and African-American students wanted the same things, and they could learn to work together and even trust each other. In other words, we were all people with the same hopes, desires and dreams. And to keep the church doors shut to anyone was unconscionable.

And this is what the church youth group knew: Jesus wouldn’t have just thrown the doors open to all comers; he would have gone out and ministered to them and talked to them and lived with them as one of them.


Nancy Rosback at Bend the Page is leading a blogging discussion of Spencer’s Mere Churchianity. See also what Fatha Frank has been writing at Public Christianity.

Look at the Books: Something's Going On

Over at Internet Monk, Jeff Dunn posted a book review Thursday under the title of “Christianity’s Forgotten Man.” The book is Jesus Manifesto: Restoring the Supremacy and Sovereignty of Jesus Christ by Leonard Sweet and Frank Viola. As I read the review, I was reminded of another book I’m going to be reading soon: David Platt’s Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream.

And, of course, there’s the book we’ve been discussing (via Nancy Rosback at Bend the Page): Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality by Michael Spencer, the original Internet monk.

There are others. And there are a lot of blog posts on these and related subjects, like the one posted Thursday by author Ian Morgan Cron entitled “Christians in Exile,” about a meeting he has with someone in a coffee shop, and the reasons why the someone has left the church.

When you see a spate of books on a similar subject, that’s a good indication of (1) publishers are seeing some level of market demand or opportunity and (2) there’s something going on. In this case, it appears that people are seeking Jesus, and a lot of them are doing it outside the church, or at least outside what Michael Spencer calls “churchianity.”

This isn’t necessarily a new phenomenon. More than a century ago, the philosopher doctor Albert Schweitzer wrote a book called The Quest of the Historical Jesus, and he was by no means the first or the last to do that.

It’s as if there is an understanding that we keep letting culture get in the way of our understanding of Jesus. Sometimes we try to “reinterpret” Jesus and in the process end up projecting our own doubts, questions and cultural understanding on him. Schweitzer was criticized for doing something exactly like that.

In Mere Churchianity, Spencer stakes a rather definitive claim as to what we can actually know:

• Jesus really existed.
• He was Jewish.
• He didn’t operate within a democratic system.
• He accepted the Hebrew Scriptures, with conditions.
• And, most importantly, Jesus is (note the change in verb tense) the incarnation of the One God.

That is what we can know, Spencer says. Accepting that is another story (and the next chapter).


Nancy Rosback at Bend the Page is leading a blogging discussion of Spencer’s Mere Churchianity. See also what Fatha Frank has been writing at Public Christianity. Yesterday, Fatha Frank did a cool wrap-up of all kinds of related blog posts, and has a new post called Jesus Works. Today, Bob Spencer at Wilderness Fandango had a discussion as well: My Faith Walk...For Now.